It is a good question Janice. In the fifties and sixties there were hundreds of mother and baby homes across England that were run by local authorities, charities, churches and the Salvation Army. They weren't hugely resourced and relied on unpaid labour to operate. They were only set up to look after mothers and babies when the children were very young and so a decision had to be made what happened next. Contrary to popular opinion, many using these homes were't unmarried mothers but were being helped through a difficult time due to lack of support at home for various reasons. A large proportion of the unmarried mothers and their babies were taken back by their families after staying here.Only a minority of children were put up for adoption. This amounted to about 185,000 which sounds like a large number but this is over many decades and across the country. Like others on this thread, there are people in my life who have been adopted and they grew up in loving families.I am very uncomfortable with some of the harsh judgements that are being made of the people involved in this system who seemed to have been primarily motivated by the welfare of both the mother and child and often worked on a voluntary basis. It is particularly upsetting to see midwives traduced - women who devoted their lives to mothers and babies.People may, with the benefit of hindsight, try to impute malign intent to them but that ignores the position they were in. Obviously most of these mothers were poor and, without family support and a functioning welfare state, leaving the child with them just wasn't feasible. My Irish friend points out that at the time this was happening there most of the adults involved would have grown up with someone who was alive at the time of the famine and Ireland was an impoverished country with a significant amount of the population living just above subsistance level. A change of one productive member of the household into two dependents would have been sufficient to tip it into penury. The idea that, once the family had made the hard decision that it couldn't raise the child, the mother's rights had been ignored, is a very 21st century concept.The issue doesn't arise as much in our present day largely because most 'unwanted' pregnancies are aborted. One wonders how much choice young mothers, in similar circumstances to women in the fifties and sixties are given in this decision. I suspect not much and, in our determination to prove our superiority to previous generations, we are ignoring much greater injustices in our own time.
Diane Brown ● 10d